GNU/consensus/relationships

Relationships Break Up by Application

Types of Human Relationships

Strong Links

Strong links are the few people whom you keep in touch with throughout your life.

They're counted on one hand's fingers, and they're the one who provide emotional and affective support.

This group may be composed of your mom, your life partner, your best friends: people whom you "know by heart", and who know you as well.

People in this social circle are pretty stable over time.

Weak Links

Weak links are the people with whom you interact with regularly. You usually possess decent knowledge about their recent life events, and their affiliations.

There seems to be a limit of how many weak links you can keep track of, known as the Dunbar's number, and that's approximately 150. Beyond this point, you'd probably forget their cat's name, their children's names, their occupation, or the location of their last vacation.

People in this social circle are mostly stable, according to your lifestyle.

Ephemeral Links

The rest of the hundreds or thousands of people you interact with.

You mostly rely on trust to interact with them, and probably won't interact much with them again soon.

People is this social circle come and go as you interact with new people. Some of them might reach the Weak Links circle, and most of them will just fade away from memory.

Social Software by Relationship Type

Given the previous characterization of social networking, based on social research, we may attempt breaking up existing applications to see which cover what relationships.

Senses \ Social Circle	STRONG	WEAK	EPHEMERAL
Touch	X	x
Smell	x
Taste	x	x
Sight	X	x	X
Hearing	x	X	X

Huh? X shows a strong component of the sensual experience within that social circle; x shows a significant component; an empty box means a sense that is usually not happening within this circle. Obviously, that table is not scientific and only applies to the general case. The blind won't "see" their friends and feel more through touch and hearing; the deaf will feel more through touch; etc. It simply means to expose the difference between circles: you might as well have sex with an ephemeral link, in which case both taste and smell will play a role. But in general, if smell is playing a role at role, you're probably within your strong links circle! Taste does not necessarily refer to tasting each other, but rather to eating together :) The ephemeral circle has a strong sight and hearing component simply because you might rely more on those senses to evaluate trust: reading reviews, comments, or getting visual or vocal queues.

Social Circle	Process	Technologies	Services	Proprietary	Free
STRONG	Unicast	shoe, home-cooking, PC, fixed phone	Chat, Email, Encryption, Telepresence, Audio/Video	Facebook, Skype, LAN Games	Email, GNU Privacy Guard, IRC+OTR, GNUnet+Secushare, SIP+ZRTP, SSH+screen, Tox, XMPP+OTR
WEAK	Multicast	car, restaurant, laptop, mobile phone	Blog, Chat, Microblog, Multicast, Tele-Presence, A/V	all of them, MMORPG	+ Friendica, GNU social, LinkedData, Lorea, Pump.io, Tent...
EPHEMERAL	Broadcast	train, supermarket, network, TV	Bittorrent, Blog, Microblog, Web	NSA, Hollywood, Media Corporations, TV	Free Press, Internet, Libraries, Public Space

Related Work

The Real Life of Social Networks presentation was shared on the GNU social mailing list in 2010.